Navigating the Trust Apocalypse: Examining Collective Agency and Distributed Cognitio

26:04Dr. John Vervaeke:That means, like in the most recent paper on naturalizing relevance realization, any attempt to apply any formal system probability, math, logic, requires you take the statistically large world and you translate it into a small world of well-defined problems, no significant novelty. There's only risk. There's no ambiguity. And the problem is that means that formalization process itself is not capturable in a formal system because the formal system presupposes that formalization has occurred. That's relevance realization. Okay, so ultimately the way we're connected to reality is not through certainty but through relevance realization, which is this kind of evolving cognitive adaptivity.

26:48Dr. John Vervaeke:And I put it to you that when we start to talk about evolving connectivity, it's evolving, it's adaptive, it's constantly trying to maintain continuity of contact. Like think about an organism that's adapted to its environment. It's constantly learning, shifting across generations. It's constantly maintaining a coupling. It's participating. And I put it to you that that gives a creature a sense of home in a deep sense. biologists talk about niche construction but i think for us psychologically that's the sense of belonging and what i'm going to say is what that sense of belonging translates into sort of when we're talking about cognition is trust that i am coupled to something in a way that has this important feature it is necessary to me if i don't do relevance realization for example i collapse It is necessary to me, but I don't feel compulsive.

27:46Dr. John Vervaeke:And so let me try and make concrete examples. When I'm reading a compelling argument, I find the answer compelling but not compulsive. I can still freely choose to not believe it. I have that capacity. John Searle makes a great point about this. But nevertheless, there's something compelling. And Frankfurt calls this voluntary necessity. When I love Sarah, I cannot do any other than because it's who I am. But I don't feel that I'm addicted. I don't feel I've lost my agency. I feel like my agency is in full flowering. When I am compelled by the beautiful and I must look at it, I don't feel, oh, I'm enslaved.

28:31Dr. John Vervaeke:I feel instead I'm most alive. Right. And when I was talking to Bishop Maximus in Rome about this, he had made an argument about Clement's notion of faith, Clement of Alexandria. And he did he did his argument. And I said, I'm getting from this that what you're talking about faith is what is this. And the penny dropped for me is this sense of voluntary necessity that I find in reason, in love, in beauty and the flow state. And he went, sorry, this is ego gratifying, but I just got to do it. He said, John, that's a perfect argument. And I thought, oh, wow. So I'm talking to a monk who's a bishop of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

29:11Dr. John Vervaeke:And he says, I'm getting it sort of right about what this faith is. Notice this is not believing without evidence or believing in the face of evidence. This is the sense, and my point here is like trust is primordial because I can't get below voluntary necessity, relevance, realization, that sense of reasonableness, that sense of beauty, that sense of, what would I use to judge that? And so trust is profoundly fundamental. And we have this sense that there's a faith to it, which is ultimately I'm trust that trust orients me in a way that reliably is going to mature me towards reality. And that's what I think the difference between faith and trust is.

30:00Dr. John Vervaeke:Faith is trust in a sense of sacredness, a connectedness to reality that is making us wiser. And I think that is what people are craving right now. So that's my second proposal. I want to bring out here that it's very, very difficult to think about – well, Jordan, you and I have talked about this. It's very, very difficult to think about catalytic communities without them having some shared sense of sacredness, something that they deeply – some sense of what is real that they co-commit to, they co-couple to. Not only are they coupled, I'm suggesting not only they are coupled to each other, they have to be profoundly coupled to the world in the right way in order for there to be a catalytic community.

30:48Dr. John Vervaeke:And that's what I think is the deep connection between the meaning crisis and trust. Because the meaning crisis is people feel not only disconnected from each other, they feel uncoupled from reality. Their world seems full of bullshit. It seems surreal. And that is another reason why they can't trust. You can't trust something if you don't sense that it's real. So that's my second proposal. The proposal in a nutshell is that catalytic communities of trust have to be bound by some sacred canopy.

31:26So I'm just reflecting back on obviously all the stories, Jordan, you and I have heard around, you know, General McChrystal's crystals and then his work bringing the team of teams methodology into kind of the corporate world through the McChrystal Group and management consulting. But going back to that kind of early, his early experience, I don't know. I mean, I could frame it as sacred in a way because of the nature, as John said, the military that, you know, when you're in war, you figure out how to innovate. The imperative is live or die. It doesn't get, you know, much stronger imperative than that.

32:04You know, if we keep doing it this way, we die. If we innovate, we may die, but we may not. Let's go innovate. And I'm, you know, I could say that for in that context, obviously, how do you bring it out of that context is a different discussion. But in that context, you could argue, well, that was pretty sacred. I mean, you've got, you know, you talk to any special operators and their love and trust, you know, just of their team, their faith in the mission, whatever. I guess, I mean, Gordon, you reflect on it probably better than I, but, you know, there is something, I guess, sacred there. We've looked at it, you know, how do you bring that out of that context is a Caledic community can't exist without a calling, without...

32:51That's it.

32:55The networks, the nodes in the community have to, I know this subjugate is the right word, but they have to almost subjugate themselves to the shared, I've always called it the shared higher purpose. The thing that is bigger than all of us. Yes. and something like the trust apocalypse or the mean cry clearly that's bigger than all of us and any one of us in and even if we're a node that is a network below the whole team of teams is the idea that every node in the in the network is itself a network type of thing but i think you're bringing it out of the the military context where i say yeah i believe there is definitely something very sacred as as the the thing that holds the community and the mission i I mean, you know, they clearly had, and obviously not, depending on who you talked about, it's kind of going back to that time, the mission was to kill or capture terrorists.

33:54You know, that was, and Stan talks about it in his book, that was kind of the unifying. But at the end of the day, the sacred was we live or die. You know, we're either going to win or lose. We're going to live or die. I think bringing out of that context and the work we're now doing of trying to say, okay, well, how do you use this to combat true wicked problems, societal level wicked problems? We always anchoring, hey, the first thing is you've got to bring people together. There has to be some convening that brings people together. And that's kind of what we're working towards now or later in the year.

34:29but we have to all unify under a shared higher purpose or higher calling, or, you know, maybe there is a sacred element up there in some respect that we're all bound to that that is bigger than us. And if, if you have, I enjoy, I think from your lived experience, if you have people in there that kind of aren't willing to, and again, subjugate is not the right word, maybe you can find a better word, but aren't willing to, you know, surrender, or maybe is a better word, surrender to this is bigger than us. Yes, there's something in it for me. I think we, you have to be practical. We're all human beings.

35:04You know, there's nodes in the network. There's like, and I think that was the lived experience out of General McChrystal's work was people came to it because there was something in it for them, but they stayed because there was a bigger calling here. Just the self-service part, you know, the good for me got them in it, but that wasn't going to hold them. What held them was there is something bigger than us that we're all working towards. That's how he managed to bring together very tribal, different groups of special operations that would never talk or work together in a normal world. Jordan?

35:47Yeah, my mind turns towards a conversation that I heard between you and Jonathan about the notion of spirit, which I think is these notions begin to really collapse, which is to say that there is some form of identity that has the characteristic of a hierarchy of values that includes the fact that as I participate as a member of this identity, two things happen. One is the hierarchy of values I subordinate or I surrender to that hierarchy of values. And I noticed that as a consequence, this orientation, this participation harmonizes is my own values hierarchy towards the highest. What's in it for me is not just that I can do something kind of here horizontally, but rather I can actually access and participate in values that I can acknowledge are very high or even higher than I'm able to perceive or achieve on my own.

36:42And that's what holds me together in the multiplicity. We're very much talking about this question of multiplicity into unity. And we're very much talking about this question of a spirit and the existence, the ontology of it. There is something that is, and we are participating in that is-ness. Of course, this is fractal. We could say that from the meaning perspective or from the individual meaning perspective, to the degree to which I perceive myself as this kind of thing and my multiplicity of people parts are coming together in harmony, unified under my spirit, I am now able to feel a sense of meaningfulness in my own life.

37:18My choices are aligned. How I'm spending my time aligns with the way that I ought to be spending my time, that kind of stuff. And then as I come into a fracturally larger node, the three of us, and we notice that the time that we are spending together is actually fruitful, that it is bearing fruit. There's a reason why the three of us are speaking at this moment in time. And there's something about the spirit that is present in this triad that each of us are part of, and it aligns with each of us. It highlights and accentuates and even enables the emergence of things that we could not do on our own, but nonetheless, we value from our primary self, that kind of thing.

37:58And so, that fact that there's an emergent value that I would love to get access to that I can on my own, well, shoot, the only way I can get it is I play with this group of people. That creates a very powerful binding. Like, oh, now I know why I'm participating in this multiplicity, in this unity, because it actually furthers myself in a way that I couldn't possibly on my own. And also, there's something even irreducible. Like, myself actually expands as a consequence. I am holistically more, right? It's not a narrow thing. It's a broad thing. So, yes. So, the proposition that the notion of catalytic community, which is very, very distinct.

38:34So, let me make a separation. You have something like networks, and that's the nature of the world that we live in is a network of networks kind of world. And over here, you have catalytic community. And a catalytic community is what happens when you construct a way of bringing people into relationships that takes advantage of the leverage and the power and the potential of networks of networks, but is designed around this notion of spirit, this notion of a sacredness. that allows the gathering of those who are called together and on the basis of being in a network to be oriented by something which is bringing them towards a higher and towards a higher and towards a higher.

39:16And so that to participate in this very rapidly becomes the most obviously right thing that you could do, if that makes any sense, because it's the way for you to be oriented, not only do the thing that you value the most, but be oriented towards even more valuable things than you currently can perceive.

39:34Dr. John Vervaeke:Yeah, I think that's excellent. I mean, that's also part of the vertical dimension that Jonathan talks about faith, that sense of not only being called, but being called to something that you don't yet see, right? Yeah. I think, by the way, I'm suggesting to you that the sense of being called and which overlaps with the sense of being called together is that sense of voluntary necessity. When I'm called by a good argument, I'm not, it's not compulsive to me, but it's compelling. It's compelling, but not compulsive in an important way. And I liked your recovery of the platonic proposal that we get the inner harmonization and the outer harmonization, and they're reverberating with each other in this reciprocal opening way, which is the opposite of addiction.

40:24Dr. John Vervaeke:And so part of what we're talking about is what trust gives you is it gives you a fellowship of spirit and it gives you this reciprocal opening to reality that isn't the same thing as certainty, but it's actually what makes what can really orient you and provide you with a profound sense of meaning and belonging and also, you know, beauty and rational guidance in a profound way. Is it perfect? No, it can't be, and we shouldn't want it to be, because that is, again, to try and slip back into a notion of certainty, at least one notion of perfection, the standard notion that we have right now. So if those two proposals are in, now I want to present the problem.

41:15Dr. John Vervaeke:Given this, we face two things that make all of this problematic, which is a technology that is designed to atomize us, cut us off, reinforce our narcissism while making us – bullshitting us about giving us autonomy. This is what you both reported you realized, while actually making us like the servants or the slaves of heteronymous forces that are like almost demonically possessing, to speak mythologically. We have a technology that's driving us in exactly the opposite way, fragmenting us, making us profoundly egocentric, disconnected, make us suspicious. The hermenex is suspicious. Suspicious and cynical of everything beyond our impulsive desires for quick pleasure.

42:07Dr. John Vervaeke:I'm being very hyperbolic because I'm trying to really put a point on this. Right. And then we have when we might think of that as an evil, wicked problem. Sorry for the bad pun there. But then we have, I think, a more I don't I think it's a wicked problem, but I don't think it's evil, which is one of the things that's happened because of this technology of connection, not connectedness, but technology of connection is we have come into a profound historical and cross-cultural pluralism that we can't ignore anymore. There is the deep problem of how do we get a shared sense of, I mean, I will talk, I'm obviously concerned with one particular aspect, but I'm not claiming it's exhaustive.

42:50Dr. John Vervaeke:So for me, the philosophical Silk Road is about this problem. How do we get a shared sense of the sacred between the Buddhist and the Christian and the Muslim and the Jew and the indigenous person such that we can deal with the global problem of the trust apocalypse and the meeting crisis? I'm not saying that's the only version. You understand? I'm just using that as an example. So we've got two issues. We've got the problematization of our deep interweaving with a technology that is driving us into cynicism, suspicion, self-centeredness, and impulsivity, exactly the opposite of the kind of stuff we're talking about here.

43:31Dr. John Vervaeke:And then the discovery of a cross-historical, cross-cultural, deep pluralism that we can't pretend isn't there anymore. And we can't, well, we'll just conquer you and destroy you, or your sacred is just an immature version of mine. Those strategies I don't think are available to us anymore. So these, I mean, I'm sure these aren't the only problems, but given that we've moved, the two proposals seem to have landed, we've got some common ground. I can now say, well, we face these two deep problems about this. And I want to bring both the, I mean, I'm working and Jordan's been advising and Kieran, you know about this.

44:13Dr. John Vervaeke:I'm working with Sunday Labs to really try and address, like, can we not only create different technology, but a different philosophy of technology that will address, deeply address how distrustful technology is making us. And that has to do with how do we properly give a sense of privacy to people. How do we balance privacy and participation that affords trust rather than cynicism and nihilism and narcissism? And then the other one is the Philosophical Silk Road Project for me, which is how do we build a trust that requires some shared sacred across different communities of sacredness? Because I assume what we can't do with the trust apocalypse is just to like our groups trust.

45:05Dr. John Vervaeke:We trust because that's just the us and them. That's what I'm saying is we can't default to a tribalism of trust or elsewhere. We're in a performative contradiction writ very, very large. So those are the two problems. I'm not claiming they're exhaustive and you each have 30 seconds to solve them. And then, you know, and then we'll turn them into concrete policies for politicians and economists, and then we're done. So who wants to, But first of all, I'm open to you challenging me on these problems, but I am presenting them given the two previous proposals. Well, I'm going to take two pieces. Very distinct.

45:45So the first is – what's the right way of describing it? So this has to do with something like in a particular kind of mediated context, we have historically produced methodologies for producing larger than Dunbar aggregates of people. So we have basically – I'm recapitulating some old stuff for me. So we basically have the indigenous mode, which has a way of holding together groups of people roughly at different levels of Dunbar. And it's a whole methodology, a whole bunch of stuff that goes into that. And it's interesting. It's many different versions of the same thing, more or less. Then you have this other mode that emerges, which I'll just call civilization.

46:37Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Other people might differ on exactly what the proper word is there, but in the past, I called it game A just to make it a unique signifier. Mm-hmm. The key thing of civilization or game A is that the primary binding mechanisms are formal narratives, which include legal structures, formal legal structures, not common law, but the codes, legal codes and things like that, and the institutions. Because if you think about an institution in the civilization sense, you can find the formal narrative that defines its boundaries and its operating methodologies. So formal narratives are the thing.

47:15Now, formal narratives, another word for that in certain contexts is paradigms. Okay. And we have now gone, it's been a little bit of time critiquing the limits of paradigmatic methodologies in binding groups of people. Now, the first part, so this is Roman numeral one, the response to the problem is we're dealing with a novel methodology. We actually have to enter across. We're exiting the era where formal narratives and whatever the tools you want to throw into that toolkit produced a way of getting groups of people to work well together. We're moving into a new set of methodologies of which this network of networks, et cetera, et cetera, are part of the toolkit.

47:59That's very, very important to keep in mind, right? Because to the degree to which you're intuitively going to want to import methodologies from the past 2 ,000, 5 ,000 years or so, you're going to have to be very careful to make sure that you're not accidentally importing a way of doing things that can't work. Now, this goes back to, again, Again, I'm repeating myself in terms of like the cybernetics and predicting control and systems of certainty, et cetera. And then the other piece, the second piece is, and I can vaguely sense it, but I can't quite get there, which is something like the real transcendent.

48:34And this is to say, I want to separate a formal narrative that endeavors to articulate the real transcendent, but is ultimately articulating it as a formal narrative, which some might know as a doctrine or a creed or a schema, a story about what our values are and who we are. and then if it hears the real transcendent. The only proper answer to the proposition you're putting forward is that if there really is an actual transcendent that transcends and embraces or integrates and orients, if there's a spirit that includes all of us in this multiplicity, then we need to find it and orient ourselves to it.

49:16If there isn't, then there isn't. right? So in some sense, it's extremely simple. The answer to your question is radically simple. If in reality, there is a spirit that transcends and yet embraces, includes, integrates, and supports in a way that is considered to be healthy and whole, just like the three of us, there's a spirit that holds the three of us. And I do not feel the spirit is as addictive. I do not feel the spirit is tyrannical. I feel the spirit as voluntary compulsion. Was that the phrase? What's the phrase? Voluntary necessity. Voluntary necessity. Voluntary necessity. So, I feel the spirit is voluntary necessity.

49:53So, the question is, is there in the transcendent and in the real, the really transcendent, is there really something that has the characteristic of voluntary necessity for all people that currently are in the world? And then what happens is the two degree to which we collectively point towards it and orient to it and embody it, and it has this characteristic of voluntary and necessity, then people will choose to participate. As they choose to participate, they will notice that it is in fact increasingly bearing fruit. It's orienting their lives more and more towards all the things that they value the most and have all the characteristics we were just talking about.

50:33I see it as very much, weirdly enough, this is exactly I think the endpoint of this idea of the catalytic community. I think it's TBD. I don't think we actually know what the topology of humanity is. It may be that there's actually some weird fractal construct where there's a three distinct spirits that are able to be in something like relationship, but not fully integrated. Or maybe there's one. It's probably not, or maybe there's a very large number. There's probably not like five.

51:10Kieran? I go back to something you were saying as we got into this particular thread, certainty versus trust. And it just struck me as, as a human being, would I rather have certainty or trust? And it was like, well, trust, obviously. I mean, it just seemed like such a, it was, for me, it hit me as quite a profound kind of insight of, well, of course, why do I want certainty? I don't want certainty. I want trust. I think almost I was thinking earlier of the kind of evolutionary biological survival imperative that trust exists, as you were saying earlier, is like a more profound thing, certainly than certainty, because without it, how on earth would we have survived and come together?

51:59So there's probably something biological here for sure that makes love and trust, you know, really profound human emotions or feelings. So anyway, that was a bit of an aside. I mean, I'll come down a few levels, you know, up to the level of humanity, civilization across the globe, different belief systems. and i share kind of i think the thought process we got to at the end of last year and this is a little more kind of if you will you know looking at the u.s and society in the u.s is kind of ground zero in a way and you talk about the the atomization that technology well you know where did the technology come from it came from it came from a certain place in in America type of thing.

52:52So we, as we looked at it, we kind of said, okay, there's three acts. Act one was the beginning of the breakdown of societies post-World War II, the 50s, into the 60s, Robert Putnam with Bowling Alone, his latest book Upswing kind of writes about that. Even his latest book goes back to the late 1800s, the Gilded Age, likening where we are now, the adatomization, the rise of social inequality, very, very similar or parallels, should we say. And his point around it is, hey, we've been here before and we've been able to get to a point where we reached the peak of trust in society, trust under institutions, trust in each other in the mid-60s, let's say.

53:39And it's been downhill ever since. This is not a five years ago thing. This certainly in my book, multi-decade, obviously with Jordan is, well, it's five centuries or you with it's five centuries in the making. But act one is kind of, hey, trust in each other. You know, it's trusting myself, trust there, trusting my neighbors, trusting my community. And we realized that that's where it started. And if we can't do something to reverse that with technology or otherwise, then, you know, it doesn't matter what else you do. But we also realized that, But if you just did that, that's probably not sufficient either.

54:13So we kind of rolled into, I think, a lot of what Jordan had been digging into for 15 plus years with game A, game B was the nature of the civilizational level and the nature of our institutions that we imbue with trust and their own life cycle of where we are now. So we kind of looked at that and said, and Jordan, this is your world way more than mine of just, hey, well, you know, stacking on top of the breakdown of trust in each other was Act II, started in the early 70s, Watergate, the end of the Vietnam War. And, you know, you can see the trust in our institutions, whether that's the military, religion, government, the various branches, you know, the polls just continue to show you that, okay, so that's been happening and that's been stacking on top of our breakdown of trust in each other.

55:00I could argue underlying this is all of the meaning crisis, which is almost the bedrock that all of this is now stacking on. Okay, so we've got to figure out what – and our thesis and certainly that Jordan's put forward and I subscribe to it, we're not going to fix the institutions from within. We don't trust them for a very good reason. They are no longer trustworthy, but we still need institutions. We still need journalism because that's how society comes together to create a shared consensus-based reality that we can actually operate from and make sense of the world and move forward as a society.

55:39Clearly, that's been fractured. Clearly, we've lost that. We don't need the journalism we've got today. We're not probably going to fix the journalistic institutions we have today. So what are the new institutions and new institutional forms we would need? Okay, great. What would that? We don't know. But if we could bring the right people together, they will probably figure it out. But we also realized that, well, if you just did that, and lots of people are out there trying to figure that, but if you just did that, necessary but not sufficient. Okay, now you move to Act 3, which you talked about quite eloquently, which is the perverse incentives of the attention-driven economy.

56:14The technology, I would say, we all had the high hopes in the 2000s that got captured in 2010s with the early kind of machine learning algorithms and early AI and mining for attention and then realizing, hey, you can sell people's attention. And suddenly, if you're not paying for the product, as Tristan Harris, I think, said, you are the product or someone said, marketing-wise. So, okay, we've got that deficient environment that you talked about. And you kind of say, well, okay, how do we combat that? And we've got ideas on what would be trustworthy AI, which touches into the work you're doing with Sunday Labs for sure.

56:53What would be an internet of humans? You know, the ability to connect authentically verifiable humans. I can only be one human. You may not know exactly who I am, but I can only be one me. I can't pretend to be lots of me's. How do we connect that and allow us to share, you know, authenticate verifiable information from human to human? Or what would that look like? And I think Tim Berners-Lee in his open letter, you know, beginning of last year said, this was not the internet I imagined. The wall guard, you know, what we need is the missing protocol layers that would allow us to truly create an internet of people and internet of humans, the people-centered internet.

57:31There's various people working on it. So we kind of said, oh, that's awesome. And I'm a technologist. So that's my world. That's my shtick. But I kind of, again, we looked and said, well, necessary, but not sufficient. So we looked at it kind of chunking down a little bit from the level you were at. We kind of said, there's three acts. All of them are necessary. We hope that the three of them would be sufficient. Okay, so how do we now get people innovating? And we kind of look at who are the builders? Who are the innovators? You know, typically founders of companies, founders of maybe nonprofit.

58:02Who is it that's trying to figure out how we bring communities back together? Great, let's go support them. Who is it that's figuring out decentralized newsroom for distribution of news? Okay, great. We've got a founder who's working on that, a company called Amulet. Is he going to solve it? We don't know. But how do we support that work and bring them into a trustworthy, the catalytic community that can support that work? And then likewise, who is it trying to figure out? We've got companies and founders who are really interested in what would be a trustworthy social network where trust is first and foremost.

58:39Hey, that's really hard. Absolutely, that's what we need. But how do you get society to move over from a Facebook or an Instagram? Okay, we know that's our hard problem, but we need to have lots of shots on target to hopefully get a few to land. So that comes back to then the spirit, I guess you could call it, of the catalytic the community, the good work that we're trying to catalyze is not top-down driven. It's not, hey, we've got hub and spoke. We've got all the ideas. You go do it. It's like, hey, guys, we don't know the answer. But if we can convene the right... We do trust in the process, convene the right people, create the right container united by that, whatever that calling is.

59:25And then we're just there to try and be the stewards, to be honest with you. It's the the thick neck hands kind of quote, the next Buddha will be a sangha. Yeah. That's kind of what we're talking about here. We're not going to, we're not going to solve it. Jordan doesn't know the answers. I don't know the answers. I don't. You don't know the answers, but if we all can, you know, the community of practice, if you like to use that analogy, the catalytic community is the community of practice. And we all owe it to society to be part of that practice. And that's, that's the catalytic community that we, We, as Jordan said, somewhat TBD, we've seen it work in different contexts, the military.

1:00:06We've seen it work in corporate America, if you like, in a management consulting context, that same team, a team idea. I don't know. I wouldn't say we're the first, but we're certainly the ones that are kind of saying, okay, now how do you get those dynamics to align when you're talking about bringing people together on a volunteer basis into this community? So, you know, we've got our theories on that. But I'd say, I don't know if that solves your, you know, the thesis you put out there at the higher level is kind of, hey, practically, here's what I think we could do here today within the society we are.

1:00:42And if the U.S. is ground zero to a degree U.S. society, then we think the ripples will also go out if we can make headway here. That would be my take. Jordan, I think you've got way more to add on that.

1:00:54Dr. John Vervaeke:I think Jordan wants to speak here, but I just want to say, Karen, I think your answer is honorable. I wasn't expecting the equation solution. I was posing a problem and I wanted to know how do we orient properly to this so that we can, with virtuosity and virtue, address it. I wasn't saying, like, give me the recipe that will resolve these issues. I think what you're doing is exactly the right thing. um and like i say i think uh i i think that the the work i'm doing with like chris and i and jordan to some degree are doing with sunday labs about like how can we create a technology that becomes trustworthy for people that gives them protects their privacy while affording their participation in the social world in a way that actually empowers their agency rather than giving it away to bad faith actors and corporate manipulators um i think that's part of it i wouldn't claim it's the whole solution by any means uh and so i i'm this is what i mean i i'm concerned about how the this and then i'll let jordan speak because i know he's he wants to speak i i see what you're saying i want to push a little bit harder so first of all remember i just said your answer is very honorable and i i like it but i want to push on like like america is in an ideological pseudo-religious civil war, right?

1:02:19Dr. John Vervaeke:And it's not like the pluralism is out there. It's what Morton calls a hyperobject. It's viscous and we're in it. It's insidious in us. We can't just say, well, those are big. No, no, no. The problem of pluralism, which is that we now have evidence from Pew Research that we've had a flip. Think about this. This is profound. People's political orientation is predictive of their religious orientation rather than the other way around. There has been a flip in American culture at a fundamental level. There is this adversarial, this is pluralism in its noxious shadow form, which is religious civil war at fractal levels.

1:03:10Dr. John Vervaeke:And so I want to push on how do we address that? I mean, I talked about it cross-culturally, and I don't want to give that up, but I want to say this is a hyper-object. It's not just cross-cultural. It's viscous. We are in it. It insinuates into everything we're doing. Okay, that was my little pushback while honoring what you said. I'll pass the mic to Jordan on that one. Yeah. But, Kieran, first of all, you did hear my saying that I think what you're doing is honorable and good. Indeed. Yes. Well, let me just spend maybe a few seconds on this topic and then reach the new one that I want to layer in.

1:03:52Part of what we're dealing with is actually the late stage consequences or the inevitable consequences of structural characteristics of the environment in which we operate. So for example, the way that the internet was designed, you mentioned this also, John, the way the internet was designed technically, the way the internet has been guided in design socioeconomically intrinsically produces things, for example, like polarized hyper conflict. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Exactly. Just a thing. By the way, first past the post winner takes all political system intrinsically creates two distinct and increasingly outwar forces that are increasingly looking at an existential conflict to control the wheels of power, the instruments of power.

1:04:39We should be aware of that. I'm actually going to go maybe several levels deeper than that because it just is weird. Something came to my mind, which I haven't thought about in a long time. One of the first essays I wrote back in 2014, it was called The Coming Great Transition. And it's weird because 11 years later, we're very close to that moment. What it spoke about was on the one hand, the practical consequences of the fourth industrial revolution, most notably AI, in terms of accelerating the breakdown of the economic and political systems in which we have been operating. And what it did is it basically posed a distinction between societies of scarcity and societies of abundance.

1:05:27And that we have been running societies of scarcity methodologies all the way back to the agricultural age. So for whatever, 10 ,000 years, we've been running inside increasingly effective versions of a scarcity mentality. And I mean this both in terms of the individual scarcity mentality and the incentive landscape and the operating landscape that we use to coordinate individuals together. And one of the things that's happening is that as we've been becoming more and more capable of, for example, just being productive as a result of the lever of energy and technology, we've moved into this weird middle zone where we're no longer usually dealing with scarcity, at least in the West.

1:06:11we're usually dealing with, what did I call it? Plenitude or too muchness or opulence is the term that I would use now. But what we have to do is figure out how to move into abundance. And here's what I mean. It's actually very simple. There have been now a lot of people talking about massive unemployment as a consequence of AI, particularly among the white collar jobs in the next year, two years, three years. And it's already beginning to happen. and you're beginning to see it happen. In the context of a society that's fundamentally premised on scarcity, unemployment is existential. And everybody ultimately is at the end of the, at the bottom, every other person is ultimately a competitor with you for some portion of a scarce pie.

1:07:01All right. And so to be unemployed is to have been ejected from the society and to be very, very, very contingent because society needs to have that be very motivating so that you stay attached and continue to be part of the productive machinery. In abundance, people are opportunities for collaboration. And there isn't a fundamental sense of competition for a fundamentally scarce pie. There's rather a fundamental sense of the abundance that emerges when we collaborate with each other. I don't want to spend too much time on it, but the point is that these are very deep distinctions. By the way, in the essay, I point out there are actually distinctions in the nature of reality.

1:07:43There are certain things that are rivalrous in nature, like let's say hamburgers. If I have it, you don't have it. If I eat it, it's gone forever. There are other things that are anti-rivalrous in nature, like this conversation where by participating in it, everybody simultaneously has a copy of it in their own heads without anybody losing it, and it becomes a more rich conversation. So the fact that ontologically reality is in fact composed of both of these kinds of things, the rivalrous and the anti-rivalrous tells us that you can premise an entire way of being on the rivalrous, which we just say you can premise on scarcity, or you can premise on the anti-rivalrous.

1:08:22The reason why I want to bring this up is that that level of distinction, which is possibly, by the way, going all the way back to the beginning of the cosmos, speaks to the answer to the problem that you raised around the incentive landscapes that have been driving the technological systems that we're operating under. The reason why Facebook is extractive is because when you begin to build an institution that is larger than Dunbar, you begin operating under the rules of bureaucracy, which is a scarcity organizing construct. You're operating in the context of the market, which is a scarcity organizing construct.

1:09:00Therefore, you have increasingly sociopathic, effectiveness-driven, optimizing human coordination groups, companies, competing in increasingly sociopathic ways to extract only optimizing narrow bands of value, which is money. That's the best you can do, by the way. What we find is the bizarre thing that the end result of that is these attention strip-minding machines that are designed to simultaneously maximally addict you to the maximally useless, meaningless things is a result of the – It's an inevitable and unescapable result of the architecture that we have with the generator function. That's the technical term.

1:09:44The generator function that's driving the entire system dynamics. What does it look like? This is not trivial at all. I asked the question 11 years ago and the answer has not been even vaguely fully resolved. What does it look like to actually repremise on abundance? The key thing that's happened in the past 10 years is that we've actually moved through that portal, meaning it's not that we don't want to live in the societies of scarcity because they're ugly. We don't want to live in the societies of scarcity because they are DOA. We're leaving them one way or another. The best result that is currently being bandied about in Silicon Valley for the consequences of technological unemployment is universal basic income.

1:10:23I can tell you that's a terrible result. That's roughly the equivalent of methadone. We actually, this is another version of the crisis. Another version of the crisis is if we don't find a way to discern properly, it's so self-referential, to operate from abundance, an abundance mindset, to become capable as individuals to participate in the world in that fashion and bootstrap that into an entire operating methodology for a group of people, then the logic of scarcity also dooms us. And okay, so that's that.

1:10:58Dr. John Vervaeke:Well, first of all, I want to say, I think that's a brilliant insight. So I would say it's something like this. It doesn't capture all of the nuance and complexity. But my proposal about sort of the formal computational systematization, the bureaucratization, is half of that sort of deep grammar. The other half is it sees itself as responding to an endemic scarcity that will never, ever be alleviated. And those two are actually feeding each other. Is that fair? Yeah. A fair way? Yeah? Quite. Okay. So then I want to respond to my proposal of the problems and also to put what both of you have said.

1:11:44Dr. John Vervaeke:So I'll start with something that doesn't sound like it's connected, but give me a minute. So if you take a look at – this is the problem of proper pluralism. And I'll come back to the technology thing in a sec. If you take a look at people cultivating wisdom, people in religious traditions do better than people in secular traditions. That same data also shows there's no deep difference between the religious traditions. Which means, and I'm not saying that the doctrines don't matter to people. The doctrines matter to people. But the doctrines mattering to people isn't doing the heavy lifting in the cultivation.

1:12:25Dr. John Vervaeke:I like it. And those like keeping both of those is tricky to reject. The first is just fall into a relativism and to reject the second is to ignore the fact that the propositions aren't really doing a lot of the work around meaning. And I'm trying to get to a place where I can hold those together. I don't quite know epistemology what it looks like. I'm just stating my commitments. but let's take that let's take another thing this is a stoic move what's always good our friend is friendship always good no friendship can you know fail you and and you know blah blah and they go through all pleasure all these things power fame and then they say what's always good wisdom.

1:13:12Dr. John Vervaeke:I'm proposing to you what the abundant life is and why it is available in a cross-cultural pluralism, which is we can share a profound love of wisdom. Why is this important? Because although in many ways we are moving into abundance, one place where we are deep in scarcity right now, Jordan, is meaning. We are in a scarcity mentality around meaning. The thing that's doing that is because, well, there's lots of historical reasons, but as I've been suggesting, the atomization of meaning and making it a personal preference rather than the cultivation, a shared cultivation of virtue and wisdom, I think that's what addresses the scarcity of meaning.

1:14:00Dr. John Vervaeke:It's something that we could all love together. And it gives us the capacity to realize something, which is, I'm going to make a proposal to you, Karen, especially, because I've been thinking about the question I posed to you. When do I find people trustworthy? When I think that they are cultivating wisdom. I don't mean academically, but if I see, I like use Jordan's word, if I see a wholesome orientation towards the cultivation of wisdom in their life, I trust them. It doesn't mean they won't screw up. It doesn't mean they won't make mistakes. It doesn't mean they won't hurt me, but I will continue to maintain contact with them because I trust them because they have submitted, like the word Islam, right, to the cultivation of wisdom.

1:14:49Dr. John Vervaeke:That makes them trustworthy. This is, Jordan, why I trust you. We have some deep disagreements about some fundamental things, But I trust you profoundly because no matter the changes that go through you, I have realized there's a through line in you in that you are oriented towards the cultivation of wisdom. I realized this profoundly with Bishop Maximus. And I'm making a proposal to you that, right, and this is the other place. You mentioned the military. The other place is the monastery. And the monastery does exactly what I'm proposing. That there's a model there for how people from very diverse backgrounds.

1:15:31Dr. John Vervaeke:And what's interesting is the fact that cross-religiously, monks are able to deeply talk to each other, very deeply talk to each other. So I want to propose to you that there is a shared sacredness possible to us that addresses the pluralism. How does it address the tech? because I think if we start to cultivate wisdom, we cultivate the discernment. We start to make each other trustworthy again. We start to relieve ourselves from the scarcity of meaning and we start to make our use of the technology governed by something other than market dynamics. That's my proposal.

1:16:18I like the proposal. I mean, what came to mind, Jordan, I've had discussions upstream of trust is trustworthiness. What makes someone trustworthy in my eyes? And what would make an institution trustworthy or a source of information trustworthy? And I like that kind of precursor of an orientation towards wisdom. I mean, that's not information. Information, we've got plenty of information. Exactly. It's the, but wisdom is the embodiment, the hard lessons learned, you know, get reflected back in the wisdom of the individual or maybe even the institution or an entity. and also kind of again for me was just going to the indigenous culture you know the wisdom practices of indigenous culture and the high regard of the elders or or the shaman you know the wisdom the holder of wisdom in those societies and yeah i hadn't thought of it i mean i love Jordan, we know your thought, but I love the idea of, you know, it's almost like what, you know, there's lots of theories, I think, psychologically and studies on, well, you know, what makes someone trustworthy, you know, their handshake or this or that.

1:17:40It's kind of, that's interesting. You know, I would trust someone who exhibited wisdom.

1:17:45Dr. John Vervaeke:I'm willing to trust. And here's one more thing before you reply, Jordan. I would argue that, and I have argued, and I mean, academically published and continue to do so repeatedly, that wisdom is the profound education and enhancement of that relevance realization that's primordial to our sense of trust and connectedness. What is the wise person? The wise person is the person who in a situation of uncertainty, novelty, ambiguity, et cetera, can zero in on what's relevant and shape their agency to actually couple to that situation appropriately. And that is why we should trust them. That is why, that is because, you know, we don't have a sense that trust is just given.

1:18:31Dr. John Vervaeke:We have a sense that trust is in some sense earned, but it's not earned by providing us with certainty. That's the promise of modernity that has failed. It's earned because you get an ongoing sense. The person calls to you, voluntary necessity. There's a beauty in the way they live, such that you say, that person is oriented towards, they love wisdom. And again, they don't have to be professional philosophers. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about what Thich Nhat Hanh was talking about. I'm talking about that sense and that, well, I'll shut up. I'm excited about this because this is part of what's coming out of the philosophical road for me is what would allow us, what would allow the Christian to deeply learn from the Buddhists and the Buddhists to deeply learn from the Christian without either one of them saying, you must become what I am.

1:19:23I noticed that the construct, and I think this is extremely meaningful, is not that someone has wisdom, is wise, but loves wisdom. And by the way, this significantly hits the tone of the bell of love because love is not trivial. It's not that they feel inclined towards wisdom. They don't have positive affections about wisdom, but rather they're engaged, they're grappling, they're fully committed to their lives being in relationship with, which involves the inevitable suffering. And by the way, the inevitable humiliation to have cultivated adequate humility to be able to begin to move towards. All of which are characteristics as you start to check the boxes, you're like, oh, okay.

1:20:13And what's interesting is is this also harkens back to this previous point about the notion of the transcendent real. To someone who loves wisdom or is a lover of wisdom, and I mean this in the romantic or the sense of being a lover, is engaged with reality. Is engaged with reality from the point of view of the transcendent and the imminent, engaged directly with living life and therefore has, and this notion of wholesome, which means both whole and holistic and is wounded thereby and is grown therefore in this engagement. Therefore, when you're having a conversation with somebody of that sort, you're having a conversation which oftentimes is characterized by first person.

1:21:01characterized not by throwing forth semantic constructs that you didn't create and didn't earn. Somebody else told them to you and you could copy them and throw them out there, but rather there's a feeling of depth. There's a feeling of, oh shit. Yeah, you actually, this is a wholly owned thing that you are conveying out there, which implies by the way, richness and implies nuance. And this is therefore an individual who can perceive my wholly owned thing with the appropriate level of care and understanding to listen and be like, wow, this is by the way, the deepest understanding of this thing that I tried to put out there called the rule of mega, which is that in the context of a shared love of wisdom, in the context of having suffered life richly, we can begin to have a conversation which recognizes that my experience is my experience and to the degree which it can serve you, hallelujah, and to the degree your experience can serve me, hallelujah.

1:21:53and then we notice a lots of disambiguation that will tend to occur in words, right? We won't fight over the meaning of a word because what we're looking for is what's the meaning of the word. And as we get into it, like we said, like we've said, okay, trust, peace, peace. This is interesting. I'm going to, oh, now I get it. I've had an experience like this. And you go, yeah, okay. That reminds me of this. And then something begins to flourish between us. And that, by the way, is also the characteristic of this thing, abundance. What was the other side of it? Oh, so the other side of it. The other side of it was, okay, what does this look like as we begin to scale or grow identities?

1:22:31So I can say that John is a lover of wisdom. Kieran is a lover of wisdom. Jordan is a lover of wisdom. What is this triad? What happens when there's a way for us to bring this, and this is kind of the wisdom tradition or wisdom lineages, but what does it look like for us to cultivate ways for us to encounter each other such that the identity of the triad itself has something like personhood to it. Itself has something like lover of wisdom. You've talked about this, dialogos. Dialogos is an arena. The distinction between debate, dialogue, and dialogos is the continuity or the continuum between intelligence all the way through into lover of wisdom.

1:23:16We're now loving wisdom together and there's something even more powerful and rich to that and there's something about that which is normative. There's there's ways to do it properly, right? It is a practicum. I think this is actually correct. And so, for example, Kieran, you know, bringing this back all the way to the notion of the trust apocalypse, if you inject that formally, like this is part of the key elements, like the ingredients or the richness. Yeah, I'm almost feeling ingredients like in a cake of what the catalytic community has to have. Like if it doesn't have that at the beginning, it's not going to move forward.

1:23:49If it thinks that it's just purpose or if it thinks that it's just intelligence, then it will – it's in violation of its own essence. But if it recognizes that this notion of a mutual love of wisdom, which again, you know, it's – I'm sorry, I apologize. But it's like, if I take it all the way back to the base case of the existential crisis of war. Well, wisdom is the way that you navigate war properly because your choices matter. Athena. Athena. Athena. Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. People forget that. That's both sides. She's both sides of that equation. That in war, your choices matter.

1:24:27And so, you have to be able to have relevance realization. You have to know, what should I be using my scarce time and energy on so as to make the most meaningful choice, which is to say, make the choices where I don't die, which is a base case. So it's important to recognize that, that it is not intelligence matters, but intelligence is put into the right chair, which is on the left hand side of the throne. And it's not making the decisions because wisdom is the faculty for making effective choices in the context of reality.

1:24:58Dr. John Vervaeke:I would like to say that I think I like this, that bivalence that's in Athena. I would say there's the military deals with physiological death, but there's also death of agency. There's death of selfhood and there's death of personhood. So you can make decisions that are not only life and death at the level of your biology, but that are also life and death for your agency, life and death for your selfhood and life and death for your personhood. And Jordan, of course, you did a lot of work around that, around discussions about sovereignty, which I take to be the loss of like potentially the death of personhood or selfhood in important ways.

1:25:39Dr. John Vervaeke:And so I think if we extend the life and death choices to not just mean physiological death, but death of agency, death, or at least harm to, but I'll just use death, death of agency, death of selfhood, death of personhood, then I think the Athena model is now totally applicable across the board. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the term that I would use there is spiritual war, which encompasses all of those characteristics. And I should point out by the way, for those who are keeping track, is also the form of war that is the current state of the art from the point of view of the military. Fourth generation warfare focuses on agency and personhood because it's just a lot more subtle and much more insidious and therefore can get through the cracks.

1:26:27And that's another way of putting it, right? We are engaged in a spiritual war. By this, we have to recover the sense of war, which is to say that war is full stake. When we say we are at war with something, what we mean is that we are all in, that we either are victorious and we come out the other side having navigated a hazard of tremendous import, or we have died in a sense that matters, whether it's physical or psychological, or whatever it looks like. And so, that's by the way, meaningfulness at its sharpest point. If you're navigating a profoundly hazardous environment, regardless of what it is, having a child is a form of war in that sense.

1:27:08And so, it's interesting, but I – and this goes back to Athena, right? She's not – you don't have wars as Mars. It's a different quality. It's a different kind of thing.

1:27:18Dr. John Vervaeke:Yeah. I mean, one way I've been talking more recently about the meaning crisis is a sense of death at the level of personhood and selfhood and to some degree agency that is not biological death. When people are finding their lives meaningless, they often will use death and loss language in a profound way. And this is why suicide becomes a possibility for people because there's a hope that if, well, if I kill the, if I do physiological death, somehow that will reboot to use computer language the the the lost agency selfhood and person which of course is uh it's magical thinking in the pejorative sense but it uh we were talking about this last week jordan but the uh the quote from one a mentor of mine of uh the hell on earth is to meet the person i could have been i mean that that you know that you know there's a there's an element of that which is yeah i mean the stakes that you know that's the age it goes to the agency part i guess but you know the stakes are very real And I love the Jordan, my mind had gone the same place, I think, with you.

1:28:22When we think about our catalytic community, we have this triangle, very similar. We have kind of at the bottom, which is where we started, is an intelligence function, you know, again, modeling on some of the lineage of where the catalytic community comes from. Okay, intelligence function aligns resources to right action. I think you're right, Jordan. Really, it's a wisdom practice. It's about wisdom-orienting resources to the right action. that's you know that's at the heart of the engine if you are you know the flywheel or whatever it is that the cali community is yeah it's not not an intelligent function the idea of the cali community is is the generation of wisdom so the the like this is one of the reasons why i'm

1:29:06Dr. John Vervaeke:i mean part of i'm here is also to uh to make people aware of sunday labs um part of the reason I'm attracted to Sunday Labs is a deepening commitment to both sides of this. The idea that we could make a trustworthy and a trust engendering, not just a trustworthy, but a trust engendering technology, and then bind that in a deeply philosophical vision to the cultivation of wisdom, the enhancement of agency, selfhood, personhood, proper balancing between individuation and participation. That's what's going on in Sunday Labs. And I see a deepening appreciation and understanding of this and a deepening commitment towards it, which means – I don't think it's the whole answer by any means.

1:29:51Dr. John Vervaeke:I mean, Kieran, you need to keep doing what you're doing and everything. I'm just saying that I want to put that out as – I want to move from an – John Verveke is trying to say that he has a specific commitment to a concrete example that is trying to do what we are talking about here. He's not claiming it's exhaustive or anything like that, but he's claiming that it is plausibly realizable and therefore it is worth my time and effort. And I have a strong sense that that is also the case with you, Kiran, and also for the communities and the groups that you're pointing to. I'm trying to end on a note of rational hope.

1:30:35Dr. John Vervaeke:Look, there are real projects and real communities and real practice. There's a lot of real that's happening. We've been talking very abstractly and I've been posing problems. I think we should, but I want to end by saying, I have two, the Philosophical Silk Road and Sunday Labs. Those are the two things. I'm saying to everybody and listen to Kieran and get involved. Listen to Jordan, get involved. They are both pointing to networks of, right, that can become catalytic communities where a lot of real things are taking place. This is not pie in the sky. This is not just abstract talk. This is happening.

1:31:17Dr. John Vervaeke:And you, people who are listening, you can get involved. You can participate. You can make a difference. One of the things going for you is that we are at a chaotic time. When systems are in chaos, the inertia, the inertial capacity of the system to clamp down on individuals is loosened and individuals can make dramatic difference. Now's the time. I'm going to wrap it up here, but I'm going to allow Jordan first and then Kieran to have the last word. I'm happy with where you finished. That's great. Kieran. Yeah, I mean, I love that framing. And I will say the thing that got me into this is the quote, I think from the Talmud of, you may not finish the work, but neither are you excused from it.

1:32:04Dr. John Vervaeke:Excellent. What a great ending line. That's fantastic. Thank you very much. Thanks, John.

1:32:46We'll see you next time. Drivers who save with Jerry could save over$1 ,300 a year. Switch with confidence. Download the Jerry app or visit jerry.ai.libsyn today. That's jerry.ai.libsyn.